rumblings in reaction to the sonic (and sometimes otherwise) material that leaks in through my ears

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

PhD Recital

It has come to pass that on 01.21.2011, I completed a recital as part of my PhD requirements at UCSB. Place the date in the middle of the month and you have the year. It was a great evening with only one minor computer crash, several minutes into the first piece.The order of events1. cmptr tap2. Grey Ocean3. Fish Affected by Dreams4. SoundLines5. ToLEtFony

The video of cmptr tap is not in my posesión yet, but it will be posted when I have it. Then I will explain it as well.

Grey Ocean is a fixed media piece where I took the wind speed data and used it as a sound file. I granulated the waveforem (chopped it up if you like) with wave height data. In this way I combine the conditions on the ocean to make a piece that sounds like... well the ocean. Sorta. The cool thing for me is that I did most of this in MatLab. After all these years I am using some of those maths. Grey Ocean _ _

Fish Affected by Dreams is a piece that I have been writing for Shannon McCue for three years. This was the premier and it was really an amazing thing. I am very happy it. Fish Affected by Dreams crosses live viola, processed viola and prerecorded material. Fish symbolize spirituality as they live in water. Since dreaming is the free association the brain goes into during the phase of sleep where nutrients are being loaded into the brain, fish do indeed dream. Fish dream about the things they see, smell, taste, fear and enjoy while being awake. Dreaming that you go to a fish market means pleasure and joy. Seeing decayed and rotting fish at the fish market indicates distress that will come in the disguise of happiness.Fish Affected by Dreams _ _ (recording updated 02.14.2011)

SoundLines is a collaboration with Katherine Hawthorne. In this I take the image of of her, as captured by a video camera and read a couple of lines from the video matrix. The video is in greyscale, so those lines are turned into waveforms which I build up in a semi improvisatory manner. This is our best performance to date, even if the camera taking this video didn't perform well.

ToLEtFony is a fixed piece that I have been working on since June. The primary sound materials are recordings of Tape Loop Echo Feedback of an analog impulse generator. The Studer tape machine and the impulse generator were controlled by Christopher Jette while the mixing and the equalization were controlled by Curtis Roads.ToLEtFony _ _